Hi all,While saving photos for future builds I came across a curious and exciting concept: Saint, or Satellite Interceptors - essentially real-world space fighters. Turns out that one time someone planned one based on the Gemini:

So I took that idea and ran with it. Here's my "Blue" Gemini (USAF) with one of the astronauts attending to the negation missiles during an EVA.

I've also been reading the "Blue Gemini" series of novels (good reads, too!) and have been thinking of doing a Blue Gemini Saint based on the Monogram 1/48 kit.

Please don't take the following as critiques of your model. I am a spacecraft mechanical engineer by trade and I put forward the following comments mostly for anyone, myself included, thinking of making a Blue Gemini interceptor that is more rigourous in the engineering and science aspects.

- The rear adaptors (your weapons/sensor bay) would have to remain white for thermal reasons (no matter how cool the shadow grey is, and it is! :-) ). Also the longitudinal grooves in the adapter are an error by the model company (Dragon?) who have misinterpreted the black tape lines seen on the early Geminis as grooves. They were simple tape. A look at the photos from the missions will show they aren't terribly straight or even in many cases.- The two retro thrust bottles would probably need to remain within the adapter. You can see on the initial image there is a cylindrical retro pack inside the adapter.- If not mated to Transtage orbital manoeuvering stage, the adapter would also have to house the orbital manoeuvering motors exhausting out the back of the gold Kapton thermal blanket with the propellant tanks protected within the blanket. The standard Gemini already has 4 somewhat larger thrusters that the actual craft used to perform it's docking manoeuvers at the time.- The telescoping mass sensor would have to telescope out of a housing of some sort of a substantial length and diameter (in the image it telescopes out of the length of the manoeuvering stage.- Not shown in the illustration is some sort of radiator system to cool all the electronics carried onboard. Gemini routed coolant around the interior of the rear adapter dumping heat out into the skin of the adapter (which is partly why there are black stripes on the early Geminis, to balance the thermal management). The open adapter walls prevents that and so you'd probably have an accordion-like flat panel radiator at right angles to the open equipment bay.

As a child, after relentless Birthday, Christmas, Hanukkah and Flag Day requests, I was finally gifted a GI Joe capsule and astronaut. Hooked the guy up and tossed the capsule into the pool, where it quickly Gus Grissom'd to the bottom (of the shallow end, luckily). After everything dried out (it took days) I limited the capsule to dry landings.